Oriented on making people closer

The next Nobel Prize winner in literature will be announced on October 8, 2020. It is interesting that on this day 114 years ago the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy refused this prestigious award. The Russian Academy of Sciences nominated the author of Anna Karenina as a candidate for the 1906 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Learning about this, Lev Nikolayevich asked his friend, Finnish writer and translator Arvid Jarnefelt to make sure that the prize was not awarded to him. Leo Tolstoy, who had been looking for the meaning of human life all his life, least of all associated it with money. Motivating his request, the writer noted:

"This saved me from a big difficulty - to dispose of this money, which, like any money, in my opinion, can only bring evil."

However, the Italian poet Giosué Carducci was lucky and eventually won the prize.

And on October 8th, 1970, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsin "for the moral strength gleaned from the tradition of great Russian literature."

According to documents that were made public by the Swedish Academy, his name was on the list of 103 candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature back in 1969.

Then the candidacy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn was proposed by two professors at the University of California at Berkeley: a specialist in the field of Romance languages, Jacob Malkiel, and an expert on Oriental languages, Denzel Carr.

In 1987, the Nobel Prize in Literature with the formulation "for a comprehensive literary activity, distinguished by clarity of thought and poetic intensity" was received by Joseph Brodsky, who during his life created a huge number of poems, published a total of about 30 collections of poems and essays in Russian and English.

In October 1991, Joseph Brodsky gave a speech at the Library of Congress, which went down in history as "Indiscreet Proposition." In this speech, he expressed his main credo:

• In my opinion, books should come to every porch, like electricity, like milk in England, like communal amenities, and the price should be minimal. And in any case, poetry should be sold in pharmacies (if only because they will brighten up the bill, from which you are terrified). And, of course, an anthology of American poetry should be in the nightstand of every hotel room next to a Bible that will not object to such closeness – just as it does not complain about the proximity of the telephone directory.

  Gozel SAKHATOVA